I’m a gardener, and spent years studying chemistry so this subject interests me. Therefore I am going to inflict it on you.

Chemicals are scary if you don’t understand them, and people especially get worried by the ones we use regularly on food plants and in horticulture, pesticides and herbicides. I want to concentrate on just one, Glyphosate; it is used in 750 different products worldwide and is the most popular herbicide in the world [1]. It’s a broad spectrum herbicide used in domestic, agricultural and forestry settings and by every council in the country to keep the paths tidy and cut the lines in to football and cricket pitches (except in Bristol, where they’ve experimented with vinegar after a successful campaign by local campaigners to ban the use of glyphosate there by the council).

I will mostly be doing nothing, since I’m exhausted. I went to bed 11 p.m. Thursday night and woke up at 11.30 p.m. on Friday night, with a four hour gap in the afternoon. This is what happens when I have a busy week. I don’t know how I will cope next week, I’m even busier and it’s my birthday next Friday. I don’t particularly want to spend my birthday sleeping.

I haven’t managed to get much reading done, except reading New Scientist and Jo Brand’s second book of memoirs obviously, because I’m tired and my eyes are playing up because my glasses broke on Tuesday so I’m using my old pair. I’m going to collect my repaired glasses in the morning, before I go and visit the library before it closes to move in to the building. Since I haven’t been able to read much I haven’t got any book reviews for you this weekend.

Instead, I hope to be up to writing about glyphosate, a blog post I meant to write last weekend, but I got distracted trying to sort out my holiday this year.